


the entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. (unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.)

by strawberrie_jam



Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types
Genre: I KNOW tdc came out two years ago... i will continue to pine about it, YEAH I AM ANOTHER BITCH POSTING A FIC WITH A RICHARD SICKEN TITLE, anyway., hot minho rights, i Guess it's thomas/teresa if you squint but. im the author and i say dont squint, i wrote this whole thing listening to the greatest (lana del rey) and fear and loathing (marina), the roof scene was SO sexy its all i ever think about, the thomas and teresa roof scene but from teresas point of view, theres also brenda/teresa if you squint. im the author and i say DO squint, this is just
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:47:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25417156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strawberrie_jam/pseuds/strawberrie_jam
Summary: She thinks they’re going to die up on that roof.The last year feels like an illusion, a cruel mirage of an oasis in an arid desert.Teresa clutches Thomas close to her, blood slicking her hands. His breathing rasps under his scorching skin, as feverish as the flames eating up the roof around them.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 12





	the entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. (unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.)

She thinks they’re going to die up on that roof.

The last year feels like an illusion, a cruel mirage of an oasis in an arid desert.

Teresa clutches Thomas close to her, blood slicking her hands. His breathing rasps under his scorching skin, as feverish as the flames eating up the roof around them.

There has never been a cure, a Maze, a world outside this burning roof.

Teresa holds onto him tight, sobs crushing her chest. She presses her face into Thomas’s hair. He smells like smoke and destruction and ginger.

Distantly, a building screes under the weight of fire and demolition.

“I’m sorry,” she breathes through her tears. Ash makes her words thick. Shai twists in her memories, sick and never coming back. “I tried.” It raises to mind a cool crosswalk, looking up and seeing a boy across the street—the last of her childhood staring back at her with saddened eyes.

“I know,” Thomas chokes back, and reaches up and kisses her.

It’s barely romantic; it’s a homage and a prayer to years ago, when things were different and they could have loved each other. Teresa doesn’t know what she was to Thomas, but she knows that she did love him in a variety of ways throughout the years.

The kiss breaks.

She presses the cure vial into his hand. _Understand, please_. She wonders if he’ll give it to Newt. Of course he will, assuming Newt’s still alive.

Teresa looks at that pale blue life compressed into a serum.

This isn’t fair. She’s worked endlessly in memory of a beautiful mother, hoping for an impossible cure that really did exist in the form of the dying boy in front of her. She’s traded away everything for a semblance of an antidote and now it’s going to die with her.

Blades whir, drowning out the injured world.

Teresa looks up.

A pair of beaming searchlights meet her gaze, penetrate through her.

They came back. _Of course they did._ She betrayed that undying family, but Thomas never has. They’ll follow him to the ends of the earth.

They are right now.

Standing is a battle Teresa barely wins. Pulling Thomas up is another war entirely. It feels like she’s moving through tar, syrup, glue, as she all but carries Thomas toward the Berg.

The ship lowers closer, and Thomas tilts his head up and throws out a hand toward them. Teresa is coughing that same tar, syrup, and glue. It sticks to the inside of her throat in globs of regret. Heat singes the soles of her shoes.

Figures cluster at the exit ramp, beckoning them closer, yelling. They waver, slide, and Teresa realizes she’s seeing double.

One of the figures roars, and Thomas looks up, almost missing his footing.

 _They’re not going to make it_.

Teresa’s pulse pounds in her head. “Get closer!” she screams, a last plea to the saviors in the burning city.

They’re almost there, almost at the edge of the roof.

“Jump!”

Teresa looks blearily for the source of the command. They all look the same, silhouetted with shadows and sparks. Thomas reaches up desperately, hands chalky with grime and shaking, and grabs one of the hands protruding from the ship’s exit ramp.

_Please._

The ship jostles, and Thomas pitches forward, forced to break hold. Teresa throws her weight into keeping him standing.

There’s more shouting, but Teresa couldn't understand it if she tried. It would be so easy to just let go. To fall asleep among flames.

She’s shaken back to awareness as an outer structure from the WCKD employees’ apartments tears away too easily, softened by explosions and fire.

It falls. They watch it, but Teresa doesn’t. She can’t afford to. Not now.

She sobs, pain lacerating her body, lifting Thomas’s arm over her shaking shoulders.

 _Get closer._ If they can’t do it, she will.

Teresa pushes Thomas onto the Berg with everything left in her.

She falls back as Gally and Minho catch him and pull him up. Her head throbs where Janson shoved her into the lab counter. Pain is rushing in like ocean waves of broken glass.

But they have Thomas, and it's alright.

Teresa looks up at them, at Gally’s heaving chest and Minho’s sweat-soaked hair.

She still can’t breathe, still coughing. It’s this awful smoke, this awful injury, this awful guilt.

Someone has been shouting at her. It’s a man with anger etched into his very core. He’s summoning her, but she can only look back.

She’s huddled miles underwater, deaf and blind and only feeling something south of pain and shock. She’s in a bubble, floating, fateless.

Thomas shrieks, and it sounds like pain, and it sounds like her name, tears like precious gems on his bloody cheeks.

The water drains. The bubble pops.

Minho’s hair has clumped together with dried blood and sweat. His eyes are wide, the preyed on sort of wide. Teresa wonders if she did that to him. If it was right to.

Thomas’s mouth opens again. There is a gory wound in his eyes, in his chest, and Teresa is struck with the realization that she has spent almost every day of her life with him, but she can’t remember what the injury is from. She did, previously. But not anymore. She’s not sure it matters. 

Minho is waving her down. That uniform shirt, with the property stamp at his neck, is mutilated, just like the rest of his affiliation with WCKD.

Brenda is there, pulling Thomas in, gasping, staring out. And Teresa wants to say, _You have done so well_. Somehow, Brenda reminds Teresa of her dead mother in the smallest of ways. That same glint of fire in those eyes, shades darker than Teresa’s mother's, but just as determined. She wants to call out to Brenda’s frightened face, trembling lips: _It will be alright_.

She can’t speak anymore. Everything feels shredded.

She doesn’t have to look behind her to know when the apartments tower gives up and gives out. It makes impact with a ripple.

Teresa’s eyes are fix on Thomas, on his mouth, opening in awe of the imploding city. How like him to find wonder in destruction. A shockwave stirs Thomas’s hair. Teresa watches him, feeling distant, removed.

She’s still watching him when her knees hit the hot pavement. She raises a hand to her face in an involuntary protection, not that it will help in the slightest.

He shouts her name.

It’s finally no longer a struggle to stand, to breathe, and as the tower crumbles, to fly. Thomas yells, a sound of pure pain. Brenda holds her hands out, body jerking forward. Teresa thinks she sees the profiles of their friends holding them both back, and she thinks, _Good._

Teresa is suspended as she plummets. She feels like she’s flying; she feels like she’s weightless. It’s alright.

She can breathe now, never mind that she’s breathing in flames.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you endlessly for reading I luv u. Teresa Agnes lives in my brain rent free.


End file.
